Awards

IJCAI 2018 Awards

Awards from IJCAI, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, are among the highest recognitions any AI researcher may receive. The winners will be presented at the IJCAI-ECAI 2018 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, July 13-19, 2018.

Here are the 2018 winners of The IJCAI Computer and Thought Award, the Research Excellence Award, and the John McCarthy Award.

Award for Research Excellence

The winner of the 2018 Award for Research Excellence is Jitrenda Malik, (link to https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~malik/) Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Malik is recognized for the fundamental advances in computer vision.The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Computers and Thought Award

The winner of the 2018 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Stefano Ermon, (link to https://cs.stanford.edu/~ermon/ ) Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. Professor Ermon is recognized for his foundational work on probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and decision making, with a range of novel applications in areas with broad societal impact.The Computers and Thought Award is presented at IJCAI conferences to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The award was established with royalties received from the book, Computers and Thought, edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. It is currently supported by income from IJCAI funds.

John McCarthy Award

The winner of the 2018 John McCarthy Award is Milind Tambe, (link to http://teamcore.usc.edu/tambe/) Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering and Professor of Computer Science & Industrial and Systems Engineering Departments of the University of South California. Professor Tambe is recognized for research and development of important practical applications of AI and multi-agent systems for social good.The IJCAI John McCarthy Award is intended to recognize established mid-career researchers, typically between fifteen to twenty-five years after obtaining their PhD, that have built up a major track record of research excellence in artificial intelligence. Nominees of the award will have made significant contributions to the research agenda in their area and will have a first-rate profile of influential research results.

The award is named for John McCarthy (1927-2011), who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. As well as giving the discipline its name, McCarthy made fundamental contributions of lasting importance to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, including time-sharing operating systems, the LISP programming languages, knowledge representation, common-sense reasoning, and the logicist paradigm in artificial intelligence.

The award was established with the full support and encouragement of the McCarthy family.